Culture Change

The first steps on the collaboration journey do not begin with technology selection but the understanding of organizational culture, and staff behaviour and motivation.

Project leaders should focus on the strategic opportunities within their organization, seeking out those who are prepared to work together rather and pay lip-service to the concept. Experience has shown that collaboration works best within small groups who are committed and inter-dependent, have a common purpose and trust each other.

Cynics might say that that would rule out at least 80 percent of their department or company. To which the answer is, lamentably, that no amount of software is going to magically recover lost opportunities inflicted by internal politics - so do the hard yards and correct the problem.

The most successful collaboration projects often start small. IT staff take their time to pick the right teams and right projects with which to work. A focus is placed on the soft yet powerful benefits of innovation that come from people being able to work together in new and different ways.

It sounds glib but it is difficult. Selecting the right guinea pigs is no easy task when you cannot be sure what is going to transpire. There are some traps to avoid. For example, around 80 percent of people who are given these new tools miss the point completely. They use them to communicate, not collaborate.

This risks the process becoming unnecessarily time-consuming and no more effective than a phone call or e-mail. You'll never get innovation in that scenario. Project managers must be gutsy enough to confront such problems at an early stage and educate and cultivate the desired culture that embraces collaboration.

Tech Alternatives

The culture question is just one part of the equation. Choosing the right technology for the appropriate situation is also essential.

There are three basic types of collaborative solution. Specialized software can come with its own platform, such as those from Vignette and Interwoven. The biggest and splashiest options are embedded into core IT systems, including those from Microsoft (of course), Oracle and IBM. Some of the challengers in this frame include other household names like SAP, Novell and OpenText.

Completing the options is a plethora of open source and proprietary systems. The array of alternatives is bewildering. Collaboration software goes far beyond e-mail, instant messaging and Web conferencing. IT teams are experimenting with technologies that offer expertise location, community collaboration, discussion forums, plus the latest in-vogue software, Wikis.

These come in a variety of flavours from companies like JotSpot, Socialtext, MediaWiki, Jive and Snitz. Wikis are designed to allow colleagues to work on documents either simultaneously or at different times of the 24-hour cycle. They are popular with a number of analysts in the emerging technology research practice at Gartner.

If you look at Gartner's hype cycle on collaboration technology, it puts the knife into virtual classrooms and streaming videos, identifies corporate blogging and shared workspaces as over-rated and pays homage to the maturity of VoIP applications, presence management, Web conferencing and collaboration portals.

Beginning the collaboration journey is a tough challenge. The unpredictable can easily derail a project, so the risk of failure is high without significant due diligence. If an IT team gets it right, the benefits will be long-term and far-reaching.

The ability of colleagues to truly work together offers the opportunity to create innovation and best practice that will provide far greater payback than their investment in the technology.

And if you get it right, will anyone dare claim you can have enough collaboration?

Mark Hollands is an Asia-Pacific vice-president of the research and consulting company Gartner